Post Conflict Countries

According to Paul Collier’s “Breaking the Conflict Trap”, half the countries that achieve peace slip back into conflict within a decade. The development of economic growth strategies with broad-based local support is critical to avoid falling back into the conflict trap. OTF Group has worked in over a dozen post-conflict nations including Rwanda, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Angola, Southern Sudan, Serbia, Haiti, Afghanistan and El Salvador. We help our clients build the prosperity required to strengthen social cohesion and collaboration.

Haiti Economic Recovery Roadmap (HERR)

The January 12^th earthquake is a catastrophe that Haiti and the Haitian people will never forget. In less than a minute, nearly 300,000 people died died, 1.3 million were rendered homeless and the country sustained total damages of somewhere between two and three times GDP. The private sector alone, sustained US $2.1 billion in damages. Yet, out of this unimaginable tragedy, the GC and OTF Group see an opportunity to build back both Haiti’s physical infrastructure and social fabric with focus on competitiveness that will create prosperity for all, not just the elite.

The Economic Recovery Roadmap (ERRM) seeks to forge a concrete medium-term economic recovery plan for Haiti. The ERRM proposes sectoral roadmaps for the five priority clusters that will be refined and validated by key government, private sector and civil society stakeholders over the coming weeks and months. The productivity of the five priority clusters will be reinforced by five cross-cutting clusters

Both the total investment and payoffs for the ERRM are significant. Based on our estimates, the five year investment costs will be US $1.5 billion plus an additional $4.5 billion for housing construction costs. We expect that this investment will generate an incremental US $3.59 billion in revenues, yield nearly one million jobs and funnel over US $1 billion in extra income to the bottom 90% of Haitian society by 2015.

Our next challenge lies in implementing the ERRM and creating the one million jobs envisioned by the plan. In the context of historic destruction and rapidly growing pessimism, this goal is ambitious, but achievable with the appropriate leadership and resources.

Haiti Economic Recovery Roadmap - GC & OTF Group report

Rwanda Accelerated Competitiveness and Execution Program (RACE)

In its Vision 2020, Rwanda aims to become a middle income country. In September 2001, President Paul Kagame asked OTF Group to help his nation begin rebuilding the post-genocide economy. OTF Group implemented an innovative country competitiveness program that focused on three areas: developing the export competitiveness of anchor growth clusters (coffee, tea & tourism); creating a “culture of competitiveness” to reshape attitudes towards Rwanda’s ability to compete in the global marketplace; and, unleashing the potential of Rwanda’s private sector.

Eight years later, these efforts have yielded encouraging results towards Vision 2020 goals. Specifically the RNIC program has been instrumental in the following outcomes:

Export receipts rose almost 400% between 2002 and 2008—OTF has worked with stakeholders in key export industries—coffee, tourism, tea and mining—to identify and implement strategic actions for growth. Highlights include the tripling of prices to coffee farmers and of coffee exports which resulted from the implementation of priority actions such as investments in washing stations.
Creation of dynamic business and export support institutions - The RNIC program has provided strategic guidance and capacity building to Investment & Export Promotion Agency, Private Sector Federation and the Development Bank.
Mobilization of key stakeholders on competitiveness for development—the RNIC program ran a mental models campaign to change attitudes towards private sector-led growth among the private sector, development partners and government.

Afghanistan Competitiveness Project (ACP)

In a unique approach to designing competitiveness projects, OTF and the Ministry of Finance for the transitional Islamic Republic of Afghanistan jointly developed a two-year competitiveness project funded by USAID. The program was comprised of three components designed to produce a sustainable and competitive private sector:

Creating great products: working with three existing industries and hundreds of SMEs in Afghanistan to develop more complex products for which buyers will pay a premium. Export strategies were developed for three sectors: carpets and dried fruits & nuts, Afghanistan largest two exports by value, and for marble, a highly promising ‘green field’ sector in which little progress had been made.
Creating a culture of competitiveness through public-private partnership (PPP): the ACP sought to build trust between the public and private sectors at two levels. First, the team launched a National Competitiveness Council that convened Cabinet level officials and C-level executives to tackle some of the country’s biggest constraints to growth such as land reform and delays in the import and export procedures & processes. Second, the team worked at the cluster level to develop and implement sector-specific solutions such as the elimination of export taxes on agricultural exports and the joint planning and execution of trade missions to Europe, the U.S. and India.
Unleashing the power of SMEs: a missing link in Afghanistan’s economy was a strong base of formal SMEs that created employment, paid taxes and served as a source of innovation. By training small number of emerging Business Development Services (BDS) providers, OTF helped kickstart a market-driven BDS sector in Afghanistan that is able to build the capacity of Afghan SMEs to become domestically, regionally and even globally competitive.

Haiti Shared Vision Project (SVP)

Haiti is undoubtedly a nation in crisis. Per capita GDP has halved in the past 20 years and 2008's natural disasters and food riots catapulted the country into the international press. Despite these challenges, opportunities for economic growth, prosperity and competitiveness abound thanks to the country’s rich and diverse range of natural resources, people and committed leadership. Furthermore, the solutions and strategies to advance the country are also well understood thanks to the volumes of studies that have been published in the recent and even distant past. To transform these resources and knowledge into action and results Haiti’s Presidential Working Group on Competitiveness (GC) invited OTF Group to facilitate a process to promote collaboration and mobilization of the nation’s leadership around a Shared Vision for a Competitive and Prosperous Haiti. The SVP will address these patterns with an approach called “Attitudes, Analysis, Action”:

Attitudes / Mindset Change: mistrust between Haiti’s public and private sectors is centuries old. Coupled with a strong belief in the role of the government in private sector development, a key goal of the project is to design a national communications strategy to foster a “culture of entrepreneurship” to reposition the private sector as key player in Haiti’s economic renaissance.
Analysis / Sector Selection: strategy is often about what NOT to do. Haiti has dozen of industries that could potentially serve as the foundation of its future competitiveness. Based on criteria such as job creation, export potential and sector receptivity, the OTF team narrowed the list from 42 sectors to a handful of short-term priority industries to foster economic stability and medium-term sectors designed to upgrade the structure of the country’s economy.
Action / Implementation: reports and analysis are useless if they are put into a desk. Working with the GTC and other key stakeholders, OTF is identifying quick wins within the sectors to mobilize stakeholders and achieve concrete results to build the competitiveness of SMEs within the sectors and prosperity of the workers within them.

Haiti SV report